The Inventor-God

Part One

The Widening Gyre

Origins

The Inventor-God is an exploration of the myth of the hacker, the misshapen one, with the splinter in his mind. The Inventor-God began our human adventure eons ago and leads us even now inexorably toward the singularity.

The origin of The Inventor-God was in an email I wrote more than 10 years ago concerning my analysis of the Matrix films:

As to the why, this is a deep subject. I call this process the Inventor-God Cycle. Notice how Neo is very keen to understand how things work. Neo and Councillor Hamman have philosophical discussions about it. Trinity is a hacker (she knows how things work under the hood). The whole premise of the unplugged-who-plug-in is that they see beyond the surface of things to the code – not literally, like Neo, but they interact with the Matrix on a level “beneath” that of appearances.

This understanding is henosis, i.e., stealing the power of the gods. Think of a magic trick. It’s enthralling right up until you understand how it’s done. After that you might think it’s clever, but you aren’t mesmerized by it anymore. The magician is diminished. That’s how it is with gods too. The ancient God-Cycle is that we bargain with God. We give up a sacrifice to him, and in exchange he does his magic for us. But this arrangement falls apart if we learn how the magic is done. What’s the point of bargaining for it?

Thus, invention — technical know-how — widens the sweep of the circle with each revolution. Every “bargain” gets thinner and thinner, until we arrive at a point where no bargain need be made. We are at the 6th Incarnation, able to walk away from bargaining with God entirely. And that’s what Neo (as we seem him) does.